A Metaobject Protocol For Controlling File Cache Management

This paper presents the design of a metaobject protocol (MOP) for controlling file buffer caches in operating systems. The MOP exposes an abstraction of the file cache machinery that is an inherent part of every file system implementation, and thereby allows applications to control cache management decisions for the files that they use. Safety and protection are preserved by carefully designing the MOP so that the operating system retains control both over which applications may access data for each file, and how global resource allocation decisions are made. 2. Introduction A primary goal of every file system implementation is to provide application programs with fast access to data stored on disk. A key problem in file systems is masking the slowness of disks relative to CPU's. File system implementations typically deal with this problem by caching disk blocks in memory and using the cache to fulfill access requests. However, different application programs access data in a wi..